Practical Unit Testing

In the beginning of June I gave a presentation about practical unit testing with JUnit at the Java Student User Group in Vienna. JSUG is a small group of dedicated students that formed last year. The scope was practical as well as pragmatic - in fact just bits of information I considered useful for the daily development. It was good to see young developers that are eager to write tests. I hope when they are thrown into legacy code later in their career that their principles will not just crumble.

Download the Practical Unit Testing presentation slides.

Resources used in the slides:
This section contains links to topics I talked about. I give a list of all my sources. Hopefully Google does not punish me for creating this link-farm like page ;-)

JUnit basics used sources from Unit testing (Wikipedia), JUnit.org & JUnit, Early look at JUnit 4, Design to Unit Test, Test-driven design, Part 1 & Part 2; Checkstyle, FindBugs and PMD.

The mocking chapter used sources from jMock, EasyMock (Easier testing with EasyMock), Initializing bean using EasyMock, Mocking & Spring, Oh no, we're testing the Mock! and the Law Of Demeter.

Singletons are a pain for testing: Patterns I Hate, Singletons Are Evil and Why Singletons are Evil, Refactor singleton, Test flexibly with AspectJ and mock objects with AspectJ and the Google Singleton Detector.

There are some tools to help testing J2EE apps: HtmlUnit/HttpUnit, HttpClient, Testing Servlets and ServletUnit, Jetty, Cactus, Simple-JNDI, MockEJB and ActiveMQ.

Tuning the tests means often tuning the database: DbUnit, H2 and HSQLDB.

The Code Coverage chapter talks about EMMA (EclEmma), Cobertura, Agitar but Don't be fooled by the coverage report, Crap4j, Testability Explorer.

A new trend is testing with scripts: Unit test your Java code faster with Groovy or Using JRuby for Java testing, RSpec, JRuby, JtestR and ScalaCheck/Specs.

Finally some cool tools for testing and the build are JUnitPerf, SWTBot, XmlUnit, Distributed JUnit and GridGain.